I opted for female Norn for my thief. I wanted to make a male thief, but most of the armor looks strangely bulky. On females, it looks tailored to their body shapes. On males, it looks like too many layers.

I opted for Norn female because of the option to choose tattoos. She's the smallest possible body size.

Well they added 2 new NA servers not so long ago iirc. But yeah, they are kinda going away from their philosphy. I just found this on Reddit. A few quotes from 3 months back about gearing:

"Here's what we believe: If someone wants to play for a thousand hours to get an item that is so rare that other players can't realistically acquire it, that rare item should be differentiated by its visual appearance and rarity alone, not by being more powerful than everything else in the game. Otherwise, your MMO becomes all about grinding to get the best gear. We don't make grindy games -- we leave the grind to other MMOs."
-Mike Obrien, President of Arenanet

Fun impacts loot collection. The rarest items in the game are not more powerful than other items, so you don’t need them to be the best. The rarest items have unique looks to help your character feel that sense of accomplishment, but it’s not required to play the game. We don’t need to make mandatory gear treadmills, we make all of it optional, so those who find it fun to chase this prestigious gear can do so, but those who don’t are just as powerful and get to have fun too.”
– Colin Johanson

So it seems they've added diminished returns from repeating events, which frankly is stupid. Yesterday I managed to farm in Orr for hours and still see the same event rewards and that was excruciating enough. The point is to farm/grind/whatever you want to call it both karma and gold for you to be able to gear up once you hit 'end game', and when you reach Orr the whole point is that there are a lot of events for you to participate in. It's supposed to be an entirely rewarding experience.

The only reason I can see this being in place is to counter exploiters, but it's stupid to hurt normal players. It makes the pace at which you can farm dictated rather than free to do as much as you want.

I am thankful I can now at least play the game.. I was stucked out for 3 days while the verification e-mail didn't arrived.. soooo..

In this meantime, ArenaNet apparently increased the price of Order armor by almost 180%.. PER PIECE.. the set would cost me 2g and now it costs me over 12g. And this set isn't even max stated. Anyone knows the reason for this? Is there reason for the high end armor all need WAY TOO MUCH grind?

The WvW, dungeons or DE top stats armor all requires a ridiculous amount of grind. On GW1 I could get max stats armor on the third playing day with the stuff I had acquired at that point - the real grind was for the skins. On GW2 on the other hand, you have a immense grind for the max stats armor and then a even greater grind for the skins...

I really don't get it... I can forget this disastrous launch because I love this game, but I don't like where this is going.. on the current state, max stats armor set is simply unobtainable by anyone who plays casually. People can say its not a mandatory grind but it is very much mandatory if you want to participate in high end PvE content without being a burden...

I am level 71 now and I got exactly 6g28s, 52k karma and my craft is around 250. I didnt had the opportunity to trade alot because of possible Mail scams so this is what I got "grind-free".. I was planning on buying the Order set before ArenaNet horrible verification system locked me out of the game, but now it can barely buy 3 pieces... and I wonder how much hours of karma grind I would need to complete one set, given one piece costs all I got and I have 74 hours played...

Quote

"We just don't want players to grind in Guild Wars 2. No one enjoys that, no one finds it fun. We want to change the way people view combat." - direct quote from ArenaNet

When your game systems are designed to achieve the prime motivation of a subscription-based MMO, you run the risk of sacrificing quality to get as much content in as possible to fill that time. You get leveling systems that take insane amounts of grind to gain a level, loot drop systems that require doing a dungeon with a tiny chance the item you want can drop at the end, raid systems that need huge numbers of people online simultaneously to organize and play, thousands of wash/repeat item-collection or kill-mob quests or dailies with flavor text support, the best stat gear requiring crazy amounts of time to earn, etc. ..........Fun impacts loot collection. The rarest items in the game are not more powerful than other items, so you don’t need them to be the best. The rarest items have unique looks to help your character feel that sense of accomplishment, but it’s not required to play the game. We don’t need to make mandatory gear treadmills, we make all of it optional, so those who find it fun to chase this prestigious gear can do so, but those who don’t are just as powerful and get to have fun too.

Seriously... I love the game very much but I am frankly disappointed with the way things are going..

You can see reading through this thread that there are really only a couple points being re-iterated by a few camps.

First, you have the camp that actually likes grind. These are the 'WoW fanboys,' aka people who are used to and enjoy traditional mmorpgs. These are the people that most of us thought GW2 wouldn't cater to, and they are excited to find out the game actually does have gear grind like in other mmos.

Secondly, you have the people who think grinding is good for whatever reason (longevitiy, progression, ect) as long as it isn't too bad and doesn't provide too large an advantage. For these people grind can't ever be truly eliminated from the game, but they are just happy it isn't as bad as other games.

Third, you have people who aren't level 80 yet and think that are the current level 80's are whiners and they when they get to level 80 they will have plenty of karma and gold, without any facts to back this up.

Then you have the final camp who just wants the game to be as it was promised, following the example provided by GW1. They want the longevity of the game to come from the fact that it is fun to play and that you can earn cosmetic rewards if you desire grinding. They want max stats to be easily obtainable, while prestigious skins are difficult to earn.

I dont understand people who say they are nothing like Gollum cause they obviously have some similarities, which is only understandable as asuras lived underground same as gollum, things that live in dark underground just develop in that way.

I just discovered how you can get to the login screen. You have to create a shortcut and in the target line, you have to add the operator " -useoldlauncher" behind the path that points to the directory,

In the menu, I discovered a few new things:

- In the graphics menu, there is now a autodetect button
- there are two new graphic options - Render Sampling and Post-Processing
- The audio tab looks a bit different und you can now chose an audio device